Doctor Faustus: Introduction by T. J. Reed (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics) - Hardcover

Mann, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679409963 ISBN 13: 9780679409960

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 1992

Synopsis

Thomas Mann wrote his last great novel, Doctor Faustus, during his exile from Nazi Germany. Although he already had a long string of masterpieces to his name, in retrospect this seems to be the novel he was born to write.

A modern reworking of the Faust legend in which a twentieth-century composer sells his soul to the devil for the artistic power he craves, the story brilliantly interweaves music, philosophy, theology, and politics. Adrian Leverkühn is a talented young composer who is willing to go to any lengths to reach greater heights of achievement. What he gets is twenty-four years of genius--years of increasingly extraordinary musical innovation intertwined with progressive and destructive madness.

A scathing allegory of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism, Doctor Faustus is also a profound meditation on artistic genius. Obsessively exploring the evil into which his country had fallen, Mann succeeds as only he could have in charting the dimensions of that evil; his novel has both the pertinence of history and the universality of myth.

Translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter

About this title

About the Author:

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Germany. He was only twenty-five when his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1924 The Magic Mountain was published, and, five years later, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Following the rise of the Nazis to power, he left Germany for good in 1933 to live in Switzerland and then in California, where he wrote Doctor Faustus (first published in the United States in 1948). Thomas Mann died in 1955.

From the Back Cover:

This book is about Adrian Leverkuhn, a former theological student who has become a composer, who enters symbolically into a pact with the devil.

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0679409963
• ISBN 13: 9780679409960
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 580